OK, let's cut right to the chase, because I know this is the question everyone is asking: Will they play tonight? The answer: I don't know yet. Obviously, it doesn't look good, with a gigantic mass of rain hovering over the Mid-Atlantic and showing no signs of disintegrating before 7 p.m. And obviously both the Nationals and Tigers have Thursday off, with the Nats staying in town for the weekend and Detroit only making the short trip home to play Friday night. So there's a very easy makeup game solution. But for now, nothing has been announced. I'll let you know as soon as I know. Promise.

If they do play, Jordan Zimmermann will be on the mound for the Nationals, trying to extend his streak of consecutive scoreless innings that already stands at 18. He'll have to do it against the AL's best lineup, though, one that features perhaps the most potent 3-4 combo in baseball in Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder. One slight advantage for the Nats: Because this interleague series is taking place in the NL park, the Tigers won't have regular DH Victor Martinez.

Anibal Sanchez, owner of a career 8-0 record and 1.97 ERA against the Nationals, starts for Detroit. He'll face a lineup that isn't expected to include Jayson Werth, still dealing with a tight hamstring that probably wouldn't respond well to a wet field tonight.

Worst spring weather — ever! There were games getting snowed out last week still. Does anyone keep stats on such things as weather-related postponements? Sure seems to be a bad start to the season and we have been relatively lucky. Mostly just cold. Have they at least let you know when they might decide?" I would say that tomorrow's game is not a lock to be played either.

I was looking forward to the Zimmerman vs. Sanchez match-up tonight. Tomorrow looks like they will be able to get that one in. Each report comes in with the worst stuff clearing out by tomorrow morning.

cool – thanks! Ok – so here is my selfish reasons for wanting a rain out: I got some tickets for Christmas – no choice in the dates and it's been a little hairy trying to schedule it. But – hey, we sacrifice for our team, right? So, anyway — my favorite Nat is Jordan and he has been since he was drafted. So what happens with my tickets? Every game so far is Haren – just narrowly missing both Jordan, and Det, who I also like. To be fair, we have won both games Haren pitched that I went to , but, there it is. So – I have tickets for tomorrow night, Haren again. But if this game is called, I get Jordan! In Prince William county in NOVA it is deluging. Has been buckets for a while now. Don't know about DC, but pretty bad here.

If they play a doubleheader tomorrow, it could be Jordan pitching the first game and Haren pitching the second. And if it's a day-night doubleheader, separate tickets would be required. You could still be screwed, baseballswami.

baseballswami said… Worst spring weather — ever! There were games getting snowed out last week still. Does anyone keep stats on such things as weather-related postponements?There was a season where it seemed we were getting a rainout every week. Remember Manny Acta commenting on it. Don't remember what year it was, might have been '08.

Eric (sorry about the "K"), it's now an hour and half later and other blogs have been updated with later posts–mine not! Once a post gets stuck in this purgatory it never comes out… I've waited days for posts to emerge and they don't. I tried going back to "draft" and republishing (sometimes that works). Nope. I'm out of ideas and any thoughts would be appreciated.

My latest Wonkling texts.These are from Sunday. As you can see, she's texting me in the first inning. She's panicked.A father hates to see that, right? So I told her (I was out doing errands, listening to the game on the radio) to turn off the tv for a while.Of course she didn't. And she got the last laugh when the Nats won.(http://s24.postimg.org/el3ti9npx/temp.jpg)

Oddities in yesterday's play:- Mark DeRosa has homered in back-to-back games (and despite only 39 plate appearances, is 4th on the Jays in RBI's)- Uggla tripled in back-to-back games. Atlanta, for the season as a team, has two triples.- Jordan Danks was the potential winning run and was picked-off as a pinch-runner — then he hit the go-ahead home run in extra innings.

"Once a post gets stuck in this purgatory it never comes out… I've waited days for posts to emerge and they don't."Just to be clear, which one of these describes what you're talking about:Scenario A:Publish Post A on MondayPublish Post B on MondayPublish Post C on TuesdayPost C shows up; A and B never do.orScenario B:Publish Post AThree days later, Post A still hasn't showed upIf scenario A is what you're experiencing, that makes sense, because I'm guessing the crawler always pulls the most recent post when it's your site's turn to be crawled. If you post more than once between crawls, only the most recent will show up in the blog roll, and the interim posts will be stuck in purgatory .If scenario B is the case, then that's weird indeed.If it's A, let's throw other blogs into it:You publish an article at 1:30 p.m.Nationals Journal publishes an article at 2:15 p.m.Nationals Journal is ahead of you in the crawling order. It gets crawled at 2:45 and the post from 2:15 shows up. You get crawled at 5 p.m. and your post from 1:30 shows up.Does all that makes sense? FWIW, I can't prove for sure this is what's happening, I'm just surmising it based on what I know about programming and interfacing with tools like this.In any case, if Scenario A above is what you experience, I say just hang tight until tomorrow afternoon and see what happens. If nationals.com or Let Teddy win get a post in before you, that would essentially debunk my theory.

"Dave said… Thanks, Steady. I'll need to pay really close attention to when the rainout game is played. Based on my recent (frustrating) experience with a game-swap,one would have to submit the exchange request before the made-up game; else the ticket would turn into RCR points, which, of course, wouldn't be worth nearly as much as the original ticket."A rain check is a different thing than a STH ticket exchange. In the paper ticket world, when a game gets rained out your ticket turns into a rain check. You can either use that rain check to gain admittance to the rescheduled game, or you can exchange it for an equivalent seat at another game. If you choose to exchange, you don't have to do it before the rescheduled game is played, you can do it any time before the end of the season. If you try to exchange after the rescheduled game was played, they can tell whether you used your rain check to get into that game, and if you did the rain check is no longer valid for exchange.I would expect things to work the same way in the new world of smart cards.

I bet they get this one in. They play through rain, as long as it's not hard rain or thunderstorms. Especially if they're already a couple innings in. Radar shows lots of light green with only a smattering of the harder stuff.

I am sorry, I understand that the Nats have to try and play every game, but these spring showers are a pay and they have to be better in giving fans warning on when there is and not a game.It's 4:45, I live in Leesburg and frankly need some better warning because it's hard to get to Nats Stadium this time of day.So by waiting like this, I will decide on my own that I don't want to travel all this distance to either wait until late for the start of the game or it not happening.Does anyone have an answer to days like today???

OK NatsLady, the I checked the RSS Feed itself and it appears that the missing articles are indeed in there.The fact that they're there but fail to show up leads me to believe that there are XML formatting errors in the posts that don't make it in. Most likely, the formatting errors are related to illegal HTML characters that trip up the RSS reader's XML parser. I noticed that the Injury Daze is *very* light on tables and other formatted content, whereas the posts before and after that one are *very* heavy on such things. The more formatting going on, especially if you're using text editors instead of hand coding posts, the more likely there are to be artifacts that trip up the XML parsers.Have you noticed a correlation between the number of formatted elements (e.g., tables) and posts that don't make it into the blog roll?

"I think it was 2010 that was insanely rained out. "iirc, that was the spring where it rained basically everyday from like April 1 – June 30. I think that year and the year before or after. It was crazy!

DV — Actually, per the Nats site for this postponement, http://washington.nationals.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20130507&content_id=46869864&vkey=pr_was&c_id=was, it's much worse than you even described. "All Red Carpet Rewards tickets, Group tickets, Mini Plan tickets, Flex Plan tickets or single game tickets to tonight's postponed contest will be valid for the May 9 game at 4:05 p.m. No exchanges or refunds will be issued." I've never heard of a single-game ticket that couldn't be exchanged before the game date for another, later game (except for understandable end-of-season limitations).

"Ghost Of Steve M. said… Huge difference with how Angelos treats his fanbase."The difference today is that it hasn't rained as much in Baltimore as it has in DC. The weather is moving from south to north, slowly. On MLB Network this afternoon, they had live look-ins to both Nationals Park and Camden Yards. At Nats Park, Charlie Slowes was standing under an umbrella in pouring rain. In Baltimore, players were stretching and working out on the field.

Steady, I agree with you about rainchecks. I've already emailed my rep to ask if they really are going to deny single game purchasers the right to exchanges (refunds, of course, have never been issued for rainouts). I assume that future game exchanges is how cardholders will turn in their May 9 tickets for other games. (I'm sure there are a lot of people who planned to go tonight but can't go on Thursday afternoon.) Since future exchanges are handled manually that shouldn't be a problem. Another issue, of course, is that some games aren't available for a future exchange. I guess I don't have a problem if they want to enforce that limitation. I'll let you know if my rep shines any light on this.

DV — the other part is that the weather map shows some rain in Baltimore at about 8, and then a huge thunderstorm from about 9:45 until 11. They'll probably play through the early sprinkles but there'll be a LONG delay to finish the game. Irony is that the forecast for SE DC now shows little chance of anything here other than a thin band of rain at about 10:30. I'm sure this was based on exactly what Davey said, the desire by both teams not to start and then stop a game in the early innings.But the forecase looks a lot worse for tomorrow night than it does for tonight. And they can't do a day-nighter with separate admissions unless they start tonight's game at 1 pm and the second at 7. Which they don't want to do to let the Tigers get back to Detroit Thursday night.

If necessary, they could do a single admission DH on Thursday (boy would that throw the card system into a tizzy!). The Tigers can always fly back late. They have a night game at home on Friday. And then there's that off day on June 3….